Abstract:

This thesis presents the development and results of a research work that proposes a method of designing incremental services that works for knowledge management environments via Internet, called e-services. This method is based on the principles of collaborative design-by which all organizational profiles provide specific design tasks, and the idea of incremental progression of projects, increasing at each stage of production the formal features and functionality artifact.
The thesis begins with a theoretical study in which we present the main concepts and features three main areas: 1) new business models and scenarios that emerge from them, as so-called "open innovation" and "living labs"; 2) The research in the design field, which involved paradigms as "collaborative design" that governs the development of this doctoral research; 3) Theory of distributed cognition, studying the characteristics of cognitive development of subjects in different environments using different types of artifacts.
A second part of the thesis presents the results of empirical exploration based on the concepts, features and phases of action research method. This chapter presents the incremental design method -main contribution of the thesis- and explains how it has been tested on two projects undertaken by the organization in which research is conducted. These projects make contributions in two different environments in knowledge management area. The projects are the development (following the proposed method) of e-health service to support the treatment of the disease of dysphagia; and systematization of incremental design method by implementing a workflow tool that is useful in everyday activity of the collective multidisciplinary research that develops the thesis.
From empirical exploration emerge qualitative and quantitative results that are intended to validate the proposed methodology and are exposed in the thesis document. Finally, the last chapter presents general conclusions and specific work and contributions this makes to the scientific community, as well as suggesting some future research that may follow the experience presented here.